The personal data manager: a cautionary tale of disrespect, misunderstandings, and catastrophic failures.

Chapter 1 - The World at our fingertips

My first contact with the amazing world of massive e-mail marketing was in 2007, when a coworker of mine showed me and my boss the shady ways in which we could gather a lot of data in a very short amount of time. It was a new and exciting discovery and I felt like a hacker of sorts, straight out of a Gibson novel. We knew we were walking a fine line but to be completely honest we didn't really care at the time; the potential for communication was huge, and some rules were in the way, so to speak. And besides, we were not trying to sell bad products or scam people: we were just looking for a more efficient way to reach out to our community. So we took our gamble, and it did pay off. Kinda. Sort of.

Fast forward a couple years, and we had a pretty huge database of personal information. Emails, and addresses. And my Boss was keen on using them any chance he got. At the time I still hadn't figured it out yet, but we were falling for the rookie mistake of thinking that numbers alone could bring us to where we wanted to go. We had the habit of sending out emails at an insane rate, and yet the results were disappointing. We were not talking to potential customers any more. We were sending heartless, flavourless communications nobody would ever care about. But again, I see it now. Hindsight is indeed 20/20.

The fact is, when you try to talk to everybody you end up being listened to by no one.

Chapter 2 - Blaming the prospects, then the tools, then the people

If you are a human and not some sort of soulless AI, you are probably familiar with the oldest trick in the book: shifting the blame. We began with our prospects: it was their fault for not seeing how awesome we were! It felt great for a while, but even in our depressed state of mind we could understand that blaming the customer wasn't going to solve anything, so we started blaming the tools instead. "Email marketing is overused" was a very common statement in our meetings. And while this is - at least partially - very true, it did little to comfort us. In the end, the blame shifted to our own people (namely, my coworker and me), because what good is being pissed off if you can't scream at someone?

The main appeal of mass e-mail marketing is its simplicity. It's a popular choice for sending content that doesn't warrant a response. The costs are also pretty low, making it a user-friendly approach for small businesses that may not have the budget for a marketing team.

But it usually yelds a very low conversion rate. The lack of personalization really kills its chances at making an impact.

Chapter 3 - The illusion of control

So, what do you do when you have a database of hundreds of thousands of contacts? The magic word is profiling. If they don't listen to you it's because you don't speak their language, and to speak their language you have to know them. So the hunt began. Profiling our contacts by behaviors, openings, participation. By profession, by interests, by the amount of feedback. If you can think of it, we probably tried to do it one way or another.

And yet, we just couldn't engage our community in any fruitful way whatsoever. We were not total morons, and our daily PRs worked just fine, but the tricks of massive campaigns were lost on us.

How could it be that such a huge potential gave us so little in return? And to make matters worse, all that profiling slowed us down. When you start customizing your communication for real, the whole thing turns into a black hole: the more you put into it, the more everything else gets pulled in. Time, money, resources. Our Boss thought he had a huge diamond in his hands, but he wasn't ready for the work necessary to make it shine. He wanted his ROI dammit, and he wanted it now.

Chapter 4 - The burden of Atlas

If you talk about profiling the prospects and tailoring the communication, people listen to you. When you talk about using a CRM and taking proper care of the data, people yawn. When you say that without everyone's attention to detail, your work becomes a nightmare, they get annoyed. Many people scoff at the idea of having to help "the expert" in managing its tools, but when you are dealing with communication there's no command center, only trenches.

This self-evident truth was lost on our management, so they never really made helping "the guys who handled data" a top priority. Contacts were collected in any way, shape or form: entire PDFs, Business Cards, Whatsapp, LinkedIn, online forms, fax, excel, csv, vcards, and more. But organizing them? That was at best a thing "someone else" had to do, or "a waste of time". Collecting was important. Organizing was not.

Chapter 5 - "Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast". The mantra of U.S. Navy Seals and Organizational Management

"Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast". I am a big fan of this phrase. It is a U.S. Navy Seals saying with a wonderful nuance to it. It means that getting things done carefully and without rushing or cutting corners takes time, but it actually saves time in the long run. If you are tempted to speed things up you are prone to all kinds of accidents, mistakes, and sudden stops. Smooth sailing is so much better than fast sailing. If you want to get anywhere at all, that is.

This, right here, is what were our company failed. They thought that technology would save them time, so they expected to rush its use. They also made a habit of flooding its caretakers with all sorts of burdens, like dirty or rogue data. After a while, putting together a thought through mailing list had become such a chore that inefficiencies almost outweighted the supposed benefits of the communication itself.

In the past, computer technicians were considered magicians, able to do things that were impossible to do by hand. Such awe-inspiring aura granted them a special position in the eyes of management, and their expertise was respected and appreciated. Today, thanks to the widespread use of technology, everyone feels like an expert or sorts, even without having any real knowledge of the intricacies of managing a huge amout of data. This attitude often leads to a underestimation of the importance of the work of technical operators and a lack of respect for their professionalism.

Thanks to its ability to efficiently manage large amounts of data, modern technology allows us to handle them with much more refined and powerful customizations. However the widespread access to easy-to-use managing tools calls for a much higher degree of rigor in return. Without it, organizational management simply cannot exist.

Chapter six: marketing people want to work with you, not for you.

In conclusion, the spread of technology has brought great benefits, but the complexity underlying its use should not be underestimated. It is important to continue to respect the work of technical operators and appreciate their expertise, necessary to ensure the correct use of technology and the management of data in an effective and precise way.

Want to give your marketing operators the best gift ever? Forget money, forget vacation. Set a meeting now whose only item in the agenda is "how to create a stremlined process of entering and storing personal data correctly".

Also, buy a damn CRM today.